


The Echoes There of Me and You

by archea2



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ambiguous Relationships, Angst, BAMF John, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-19
Updated: 2014-06-19
Packaged: 2018-02-05 08:39:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1812166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On Mycroft's request, John flies to Karachi to save Irene Adler's saviour.</p><p>(A touch of background Sherlock/Irene, but so faint I've chosen not to tag it as the focus is really on John and his relationship with Sherlock. Tell me if you think I should.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Echoes There of Me and You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nox_candida](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nox_candida/gifts).
  * Inspired by [These Shadows Keep on Changing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/515084) by [nox_candida](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nox_candida/pseuds/nox_candida). 



> A sequel to nox_candida's intriguing AU story (see link above). Better read it first, or this won't make entire sense!

When John’s second plane lands at the rise of day, it shows him North Pakistan as a line-up of rippled grey stones. Mountains, filling his plane window.

John’s heart gives a matching ripple at the sight.

 _Welcome back 009_ was Mycroft’s parting shot, delivered with the man’s soft-cutting edge of voice, leaving the challenge bare. Now the words seem to bounce off that landscape walled with rock, and hiding – John’s neck muscles harden as the pictures flood his mind, the memories, raw and unwelcome – a hundred invisible caves. East of Kabul, the Tora Bora mountain held them too.

They make good hide-outs, as Irene Adler probably knows.

And even better burial sites, as 009 could testify.

It takes one split instant for past and present to shade into each other, like the stone's cloudy greys and the sky’s stony blue. Reflecting the lie of John Watson’s heart, as the plane angles itself out of the sky, and the ground leaps to meet them, triggering a convulsion of hope in John.

Because somewhere, in one of its hundred twists and turns, the land holds Sherlock.

Because if John’s story has to repeat itself, he can point it to the recent day and hour when he put a bullet between Sherlock and the odds of death.

 _Game if you are_ , he mouthes back at the Khyber Pass before he leans forward, reaching for the black bag between his feet.

* * *

Sherlock probably thinks John knows nothing about disguise. In which case Sherlock is as wrong as a soup sandwich. The moment his feet are on the ground, John turns his pudding-bowl haircut, his light cotton shirt and his sweet crimpled face into those of an aid convoy inspector. Mycroft’s black bag takes him to his designated meeting-point, just as Mycroft’s black car used to do, and John meets with his first contact. As a result, he thins his lips, trades cheap cotton for showy red vinyl and becomes an arm dealer’s henchman.

 _This could be great_ , he thinks as his covers takes him deeper and more under, his transformations fast, ruthless, flicking him from a mercenary to a MI6 renegade, a hipster pilgrim, a fallguy for a Russian cash mogul. Like the old days. Only, not quite: those were fearless days. Fear, also a great shapeshifter, came as late in John’s life as it did for Sherlock; the difference being that it came for John with a girl’s soft-hearted mouth, not a dog’s black snarl. But late, yeah. Late after the girl had gone on her final, impossible mission. 

“If you want her back, better hurry,” John’s interlocutor drawls around a mouthful of flat bread, eyes hard and uninterested. Then gurgles when John’s thumb locks itself into the dip below his Adam’s apple. A name bubbles up, not to be found on regulation maps. Yes, that’s where they kept her, the woman, but Noor came for her two hours ago with a truck. No, he doesn’t know why they kept her alive so long. Perhaps they were waiting to liaise with someone, because there was a new man with them when they took her away.

 _His eyes_ , John doesn’t say, because a man knows when to take a sip from hope and when to heed the Moscow Rules, as they’re still known to his lot. _Tell me about his eyes_. Rule One: assume nothing. _Stark staring blue, with a dark ring around the iris and a madman’s clarity? Lover’s? Both?_ Rule Two: Murphy’s always right. _No idea what I mean? Then take a look at mine._

The local black wind, the Khali Andi, flies sideways ahead of them, raising packets of dust off the mountain paths. Loud enough to muffle a horse’s progress, but too whimsical to trust with an engine’s rumble. The horse is one of the smaller mountain breeds, and John can’t help grinning into the dust as he tosses the black bag off into a ditch, because, sod Murphy, he’s doing this. He’s riding a white steed into the storm to save Irene Adler’s self-appointed saviour.

The gun keeps his back through the ups and downs of the ride.

 

* * *

 

The scene is three men, one military truck and the Woman, kneeling down on the ground. The man on her right is Sherlock, as plain to John’s eyes as Sherlock’s insolent Roman nose on his face, even kept under a black veil. The Woman is holding her phone. Sherlock is holding, of all possible Sherlock-props, a scimitar.

 

John’s mind does a double take back to a wintry morning in London, a sullen climb up the Baker Street stairs after a fight with a chip-and-pin machine. Sherlock’s long form, fidgeting in an armchair while he tried to kick another sword nonchalantly under Mrs Hudson’s chiffonier. _Problem?_ Well, yeah. Not half. Because it will take at least four seconds for the blade to execute a textbook arabesque before it hits the beheading stage, and Sherlock is not above textbook when it comes to theatrics. Problem, then, because you needn’t have watched crap archeological thrillers with Mrs Hudson to know that a bullet takes half that time to topple the hero down. John’s pulse swells against the warm metal of his gun. Any moment now.

Then a woman’s sultry moan rises from Sherlock’s black robes and Murphy is proved right.

The terrorist on Irene Adler’s left turns sharply to his associate, who happens to be busy murmuring his Masterplan in their target’s ear. Apparently, no one has informed Sherlock Holmes that silencing his phone in the presence of those who do not equate female orgasm with your average sound environment might be a sound idea.

John silences the _idiot, fucking godalmighty mindless besotted twit_  in his head, and steps into the kill.

 

* * *

 

Night fight is riskier and far less satisfactory than day fight. Day fight turns the scene into a glass landscape with figures that can then be shattered again and again, made into a red landscape. (John had almost forgotten the fights, how satiated yet empty they left him, a whole man, a sick man.) Night fight is a one-move stand. If you pick the wrong move, if you kill the wrong shadow, things can turn very messy very quickly.

 

Once John’s aim has found the left man’s chest he falls without a cry, only the soft plop of MI6’s new toy bullet with its copper tip and gutting force of twelve. If John were yesterday’s man, doctor, healing man, he would flinch at such creative savagery and bawl for gauze. But 009 is grabbing the Woman’s arm, tugging her upright and wide-eyed, then running at his side, Sherlock in long-legged attendance.

The keys, miraculously, are still in the truck’s ignition 

Sherlock says "John" once, as the doors slam them in. And then, "John, where’s the –" 

Hand on the keys, John says, "Shut up, Sherlock", backs the truck, and herds them straight into the storm.

 

* * *

 

"A two-men rescue," the Woman says in the back, clinging on for dear life, "one in a niqab. Here’s to... all the dinner p-p-parties’... anecd... _are you out of your mind?_ "

 

* * *

  

If he is, John thinks, skidding the truck around in an ear-ripping crash of lightning and recycled steel, the gangly sum of Sherlock’s body impressed into his flank, he’s fine with it.

 

* * *

 

 

Dawn comes at last, a slash of grey light between the jagged clouds, but Murphy has been half placated. Just when their truck is one tyre down, the mountainside on their left gapes open and lets them in between three walls of rock.

"– the man’s rifle, John?" Sherlock finishes, as if they hadn’t spent fifty minutes facing Doomsday on three wheels and a prayer. “If it’s a Martini-Henry, I need to check the marking.”

John _blows_ his laughter. There is a time for anger, and there is a time for letting Sherlock know how much he’s missed their act together. He watches his friend’s lips twitch in response and decides not to tell him about their only asset, MI6’s bright new micro transmitter, sewn into his shirt pocket like a cyber Jiminy Cricket. And which John isn’t quite sure can still emit. 

Irene Adler’s white arms rise in the windshield. She’s fixing her hair into a bun, looser than its 1940s’ schoolmarm predecessor and, in John’s opinion, a better fit for the shape of her face. He also decides not to tell her.

"Well, it’s not here with me, I can tell you. Probably fell under the man when Doctor Watson did the derring-do thing. You _are_ a man of many hats, John, more than dear Sherlock here." John is keeping his gaze level, but he can hear how her laughter is a touch too high, her eyes green and watchful in the damp penumbra. "Though he did at least try to make a pass... of arms."

"You don’t drive," Sherlock cuts in.

John looks down at his hands. They’re not shaking, but they’re still clenched around the wheel as if welded to the plastic. He prises them loose one after the other.

"In Dartmoor. You said you didn’t have a licence." Sherlock is looking at John, his lower tones creased in perplexity and, if John knows him well, a hint of indignation. "Why did you lie to me?" 

"Don’t," John says. One hand raised now, because he knows himself even better, knows what the scalding jolt at the base of his neck means. There is a time for anger, after all. "This is unsafe ground, Sherlock, even for you."

He can feel the Woman’s breath on his neck, almost purring, as she watches the pure hot blush creep up his face.

"I didn’t lie – " Sherlock stops at John’s face.

" _Liar_ ," John says. Outside, the storm rips a whole sheet of sky out, filling the rock entrance with galvanic light. It gifts John with a vision of Sherlock’s face, pale and stricken. " _Lie_ upon _lie_ , Sherlock. Lies by omission, so easy they never leave even a tiny dent in that mind of yours, all because you. Never. Think. Of telling me. And why would you? Hmm? Why waste precious time telling dull, _pedestrian_ John about your comings and goings? It’s not as if he was anything like, say, a fighter. Or a partner. Or even a whotsit, you know, six-letter entry, pops up in your Sunday crossword now and then. Ah, yes. A friend. The only one, Sherlock."

He watches Sherlock catching the quote on the fly, turning it in the hollow of his mind. Let him have it, then. 

"Well. Looks like you choose your friends in your image, then. Because, Sherlock? I’m a liar, too. And I’m your friend. Isn’t that ironic? The only true thing about John Watson, and you’ve never cared a lick about it. Never gave it a fuck that wasn’t the square root of _fuck all_. Too bad, because everything else, Sherlock, everything you think you know about me – " 

The sentence is left hanging in the dark. To carry on smacks of a betrayal greater than Sherlock’s cut-and-runs, although the hurt still crackles in John’s anger like salt on a flame. Because this is what Sherlock does, all things said and done. Sherlock takes human people, complex, contradictory people, and flattens them into punched cards with his deducing. Just as John was once set by his mentors before a cardboard human form and asked to shoot its six most vulnerable points in descending order.

Once. Long ago. Before he changed his mind, deleted one of his names, and came to live in London as an ex-Army doctor.

“John. You have to know…”

In the closeted cabin, where every sensation is heightened into a raw tug of nerves, Sherlock touches him. Not on the arm or shoulder, the accepted vulnerable points between friends, no; only the tips of his fingers over John’s heart, his touch absolutely exact, as always; but so light, so hesitant that John turns in his seat, anger morphing into rash tenderness, and gropes for Sherlock. He has to unwrap him first, not very gently; push his fingers into the folds of black cloth until they find a cheek, Sherlock’s cheek; stroke it; twist themselves in Sherlock’s hair and hold fast, while John closes his eyes briefly.

Awkwardly, Sherlock’s face bent to his, they anchor each other. 

"…This, what you said, _the one true thing_. Is the only thing that could hold me to a lie."

The words swirl in John’s exhausted mind, part of which is still outside, wrestling the slippery road of escape. He is trying to make sense of them when there is a soft yawn at the back.

"Oh, boys," comes in Irene’s amused voice. "Much as I’ve enjoyed the gallery seat, I think it’s time for _all_ of us to take a lie-down. Don’t you think?"

 

* * *

 

 

John’s shoulder wakes John four hours later. His old wound, that never took very kindly to damp air.

“She’s gone,” Sherlock’s voice tells the air next to his ear, startling John awake.

“Yeah,” he says muzzily. And then, “Wait. She’s gone – like that? Into the wild?”

“That would be the _wilderness_ ,” Sherlock corrects him, and for one moment, the cave walls soften into the more familiar darks of their wallpaper at Baker Street; the incandescent morning light into a fireplace glow. For a moment they’re home, safe in London. “Actually, there's a village just round the next bend of hill. And in the village, there’s a wedding.”

John tries to wrap his mind round Irene Adler and a pop-up wedding. 

“When there’s a wedding in Pakistani, they usually call for the _khusras_ ,” Sherlock explains with what, in Sherlock, amounts to saintly patience. “The transgender dancers, John, who perform at weddings and bring luck to the newlyweds. They're here now, six of them, come in a truck with a chauffeur, and they’ve agreed to take Irene back to Karachi. I couldn’t quite follow everything they said, and some of it was really too trivial to bear repeating, but they did seem to –” 

“What did they say? Out with it,” John insists, because if the night called their lies out, it seems only right that the day should be given to the truth. 

Sherlock shrugs, but complies. The six men-women, both stars and outcasts in rural Pakistani, were driving past on their way to the feast when they saw Irene and stopped to ask who she was and who her companions were. According to Sherlock, Irene’s answer was “The tall one dances, the short one runs, and I give the beat.” To which the oldest _khusra_ replied, with a wrinkled and salty wink, that as long as one of them kept it up, and not too short, the dance could indeed run a long time. 

“Cripes,” John says faintly. Then, moved by some imperceptible urge: “So she’s really gone?”

He expects a scalding reply, of the “do try a little variation with repetition, John” sort, but Sherlock only nods.

“The last I saw of her, she was borrowing a lipstick from them. And offering to put some on me.” 

John’s mind twitches at the visual, hot and tingling, of Irene’s fingers on Sherlock’s chiseled mouth, reddening it in light, teasing strokes. He pushes it back quickly.

“She’s taken care of,” Sherlock says, more to himself than to John. There are many echoes to these five words which John cannot rouse himself to consider. Sherlock must have loved the Woman’s vanishing trick. Who else would escape the Taliban in plain, gloss-and-mascara view? Even John finds himself impressed. Though he doubts they have really seen the last of her. Somewhere, somehow, the Woman has made Sherlock – Mycroft’s parting shot comes back to John – _sentimental_.

But for now, her hour has come and gone. She's gone.

“And you are glad of it,” Sherlock murmurs.

“I’m glad we're next,” John says, keeping up the atmospheric double-entendre. Under his palm, the microtransmitter gives a steady pulse. Once, MI6 was  able to find 009 in an Afghan cave, his better half gone and the rest of him bleeding itself slowly but surely out. Today, MI6 will find John and Sherlock between a rock and a wedding.

“And then?”

 _You_ , John thinks longingly, struggling to raise the ghosts past and future of Sherlock-and-John. They come in echoes, meshing repetition with variation until the music blooms in John’s heart, soft and irreversible like Sherlock’s violin on an ascending scale. Case after case, a lifetime of them, tea and finger food (with extra fingers in the butter dish), more tea, London in the magic lantern of a cab window, late-night tea, late-morning naps, and the warmth of Sherlock’s returns. All the returns, always the happy returns.

But Sherlock is looking at him, his face steady and waiting, and John understands that Sherlock is still yesterday’s man, who was told he knew nothing about John.

“Right.” The R comes out a little croakier than John intended, as he puts his two hands on Sherlock’s knees and turns them toward himself. When the rest of Sherlock wavers, John tips his chin sideways until Sherlock is facing him.

“Find me.”

Sherlock’s face looks almost brittle in the harsh morning light. John smiles. 

“You can do it, Sherlock. Find me?” – a plea, a question and a promise in one. Forgiveness, still unnamed, held up between them like a dare, and – with Sherlock’s semi-smile – taken up.

“You were in Afghanistan, yes, but not as a soldier. Though you were in the Army; I can’t have been wrong about that. Embedded, then.” 

“Warm.”

Sherlock’s face is working itself into that rare, almost mystical degree of intensity which John loves to watch. Even on the regular days, when Sherlock wonders about Mrs Hudson's new shade of nail varnish or what scientific thing he can do with their potato-peeler. To have Sherlock’s entire mind focused on him, John thinks, is a one-of-a-kind experience. Chaste and burning, and precious beyond all judgement.

“The reason why I’ve never met Harry is that...there is no Harry. Harry doesn’t exist.”

“Quite right.” Orphans make the best recruits, he’d been told by the formidable woman who hired him all those years ago. 

“But the phone…the phone _was_ a gift to you. From the very start. The way you said "Take mine"… oh, John! John! This is brilliant! _You_ 're Harry, aren't you? And Clara is…well, not a sister, obviously. Nor a wife, or Mycroft would have taunted me about her before.”

“Sherlock.” John swallows. If this is catharsis, then it’s both easier than years of therapy have led him to believe and unspeakably hard. “I made Harry up that day, because... I made her up as a gift to you, I suppose. You were so happy figuring out that brother of mine I didn’t have the heart to correct you. And, and, she was a gift from you to me, because there were things about my past I didn’t want to face, even less tell you about. So I made them Harry’s demons, Harry’s legacy. Only, I couldn’t let him be a brother. A brother is too close to a double.”

Sherlock’s silence is almost shy, almost awkward, as is his next deduction. “Harry is your second name.”

“No. Well, not quite. She, Clara, she had the phone inscribed in Kabul for me, before she left. It was meant to be Hamy, only the man who did the job misread it.”

“ _Hamy_?” Sherlock is clearly at a loss.

“You’ll get there.” John can’t help smiling. “We were close friends, Clara and I. On the brink of being more, but there was that last mission she had to go on, and we’d agreed to talk once she was back – and – and then –”

When Sherlock’s hands unbutton his shirt and push it back gently, John’s eyes droop shut again. There have been bathrobes, dressing-gowns and a gentlemen’s agreement about their bathroom routine. John has seen Sherlock in a sheet, but this is a first. 

“Yes,” he says at the first gentle touch of Sherlock’s hand up his arm, still shy of the knotted pattern of flesh. The first tears come, then, and along with them the memory of their past burn, gnawing at his eyes so deeply he couldn’t see properly for months. Tears every night, he bundled in the jumpers they’d told him to wear against the chill, septicemia’s last, poisonous heritage; he taking her last gift and trying to plug it in, again and again, to charge it with vital energy.

“She died.” Somehow John pushes the words past the closed gate in his throat. “I came for her - but I came too late. I resigned from MI6 after this. Ask your brother, he can probably quote the terms to you, chapter and verse. I can’t. I, oh god. Sherlock, I can’t…it’s hideous.”

But Sherlock is touching his scar as if he'd never seen one before; as if it were unique, curious and radiant; an arabesque; a Rorschach to be deciphered just by him.

“Tell me about Clara.“

John tries to. He tries to summon Clara’s soft-hearted mouth, always at odds with her lean body and the harsh cobalt of her eyes. But all he can say, sob out, is: “Harry left her.” 

“No, no. No, that’s what I told you. Back then, John, in our cab, right at our beginning. But I got it wrong. John, John, I got it wrong! Remember?” Sherlock’s other hand is stroking the base of his neck, his temple, brushing over his eyes. Trying to ground him, John thinks hazily, as the tears swell their hot trail down his cheeks and neck. 

“Sherlock, I lost her. I – I’d found her and covered her body with rocks, in the Tora Bora, so the wild cats would leave her alone. And then I crawled out, made it to the main route, and they brought me back but I couldn’t tell them where she was. There were so many caves. I couldn’t find her again, Sherlock, even when they showed me maps.” 

When Sherlock’s arms wrap themselves around him, pulling John up against a solid, breathing chest, he buries his face into Sherlock’s shoulder. There is a faint noise outside, hardly a buzz, which John knows will soon  roar into  rescue. But right now, the only sensation for him lies in the dip of Sherlock’s head, the press of lips against John’s temple, hesitant, then firmer, Sherlock’s novice attempt at comforting. John abandons himself to it. 

“Promise,” he says, the word pushed against salt, water, and the warm vein in Sherlock’s neck. A wind has entered the cave, swathing them in its cool ripples of air. Sherlock’s arms are trying to answer for Sherlock, but they are not enough for John. “Promise I’ll never lose you.” 

“I will always find you,” Sherlock says, holding him whole. And for Hamish J. Watson, ex-operative, ex-killer, ex-lover, _always_ is good enough for now.


End file.
